David Pitlyuk

I guess I was sort of an inspiration for 2 of my other friends with limited stock trading experience, as they both purchased some stock as well. After being down on the first day (from what I purchased it at), the stock jumped up over 14% today (including after-hours trading), making me about $230 on my $2,994 invested:

I’d say that’s a pretty good start I have been contemplating selling the shares and then buying again later. I have a feeling there will be a big selloff from the banks and people trying to make a quick buck, which will affect the stock price negatively. Overall I think it’s a safe long-term investment stock, so even with a selloff, I feel that it will stabilize and then start to trend upwards. From everything I’ve read, the opinions about what the stock will do are all over the place. From people saying it will go back down to the IPO price, to others saying it will go up to $70-$90. In reality, the stock market is a gamble. Do as much research as you can, learn what you can, see how news, etc affects other stocks, and use that to make a better judgment with your own stocks. I’m definitely no expert, my overall portfolio is down 30% (before Visa)…but just giving my two cents.

All I know is that I had a hunch about Google when they became an IPO. I put them in my fake portfolio at the $95/share, and now look where they are at. I’ve had Apple in my fake portfolio since their shares were $11.38….I would have a 1071.09% return on that right now! I have the same feeling about Visa, so this time I’m running with it. If you do the same thing, and are new to the market, just make sure you don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

One other interesting thing I found is that many of the major credit card/bank companies went up pretty big today:

American Express: +9.48%
Discover: +10.26%
Mastercard: +5.75%
Capital One: +7.66%
Citigroup: +10.24%
HSBC: +3.01%
JP Morgan Chase & Co: +9.25%
Barclays: +7.26%
Bank of America: +8.56%

I wonder how Visa helped affect these?

Just curious if any of you guys are investing in today’s Visa IPO? The stock is up 35% from the opening IPO price as of writing this. I just bought $3,000 worth of shares at $59.75…I think the stock has a lot of potential.

I’m curious to know your thoughts on whether it’s a good buy or not…regardless if you invested or not. I’m pretty new to the stock market, so any advice is more than helpful.

I’m very finicky when it comes to managing my personal finances. I like to make sure all bills are paid on time, and I know where all of my money is and how much I have. This is going to be one of my more informative posts, so make sure to give it a read AND take action if you are trying to better manage your own financial situation.

Enter Microsoft Money. The software that keeps it all in check for me. For $30-$100 you will have the perfect solution for managing your finances. I’ve been using MS Money to track my finances since about 2000, which is great because I have a lot of historical data that I can pull from.

My first process is that I’ll normally keep any receipt that I get and put it in my wallet. I try and use my credit card for most purchases since I get 1.5-5% cash back rewards. After a week or two when my wallet has a decent amount of receipts, I’ll empty it out on my desk and start inputting them into MS Money. For any items which may be a write-off on taxes, I add “write off activetuning” or whatever business of mine it may apply to in the memo field. This just makes it easier for me at the end of the year when I’m giving all my information to my accountant.

At the end of each month when I get my statement for each account, I’ll go in and balance the account. This will ensure that I have all charges in the software, and of course it will ensure I don’t find any mistakes on the statement (I’ve found double charges, incorrect tips, etc before, so it’s always good to go line-by-line). I do this for each account, every month (savings, checking, credit cards, etc…you can even do your PayPal account). Each account doesn’t take very long to do, especially if you actively input your receipts through the month.

The best method I’ve found to do this is to go through the statement, and highlight the amount in each line once it has been cleared in MS Money. This way once you go through everything, you can just back to the stuff that hasn’t been highlighted and make sure they either need to be put in, or are mistakes. The most important reason for doing this is making sure that you never fall behind, and all of your numbers are accurate at least up to that month.

Alternatively, you can have MS Money connect to your financial institution and just download everything from the statement and put it into the software. I don’t like this method for a few reasons:

1. I don’t like the names of the items that are chosen.
2. They don’t choose the right categories that I want
3. I want to add memos many times
4. It’s hard to remember what they are for
5. You get lazy and don’t proactively update your own financials, therefore you lose touch with it.

Once you have data in there, it’s easy to just pull up the “accounts list” page and easily see where everything stands. On top of my regular accounts, I also track my investment accounts through MS Money. Investment accounts also show up in your accounts list, so you can easily track your net worth.

Another cool thing I use MS Money for is to track categories and run custom reports. When I set everything up for the first time, I went through every category that MS puts in by default. I added/deleted/modified everything as needed so I could have things specifically tailored to what I want. So now if I want to see how much my gas expenses have been over the past few years, I can see that I’m spending a lot more money than before (due to more driving and higher gas prices):

You can of course export the data to something like Excel if you want to create better charts.

The other thing I use MS Money for is to manage any sort of recurring deposits/bills. For example I know every month I’m going to have certain bills and a paycheck from various sources. I set these transactions up to either be automatic (for example I take a specific percentage out of every paycheck and put it into my ING savings account) or manually (ex: My electric bill varies from month to month). This gives me an idea of generally what I’m planning to spend/deposit, and I can better manage my finances knowing this information.

You can also use this to create a budget. Based on what you normally spend/make every month, you can budget a certain amount to specific categories, and MS Money will help you track this. For example if you only want to spend $200/month going out for food, you may find out mid-month you’ve used the amount you’ve allotted and you can tone it down for the rest of the month in order to maintain your budget. This is perfect for those of you that have a hard time realizing how much you are spending, and don’t want to end up with a massive credit card bill you weren’t expecting.

There’s much more, but this is pretty much what I use it for. Using my basic guidelines, you too can proactively manage your own finances and make sure you are in control.

Microsoft Money 2007 Deluxe Microsoft Money 2007 Deluxe brings all of your personal accounts - banking, credit, and investment - into one place and provides the tools you need to help you improve your credit and debt and tackle tax time with ease, so you can spend less time worrying about your money and more time enjoying it. Money 2007 Deluxe automatically consolidates your online accounts in one place.

John Chow made a post in regards to a promotion that Citibank is running where you open a savings account (US only) and in 3 months they’ll give you $100. One person commented that they had talked to the customer service rep and verified that just a $1 deposit will do it. As long as your account is in good standing after 90 days, you will get your $100. There are no fees, and there is no minimum. On top of that the account has a 4.65% interest rate on it.

There was a lot of discussion about whether or not there was a catch. Some believed that banks do this sort of stuff all the time in order to generate new customers, and that $100 is nothing for them. Others said there always has to be a catch. The only thing I potentially saw was this term:

I also authorize you to use these consumer reports to consider me for other programs with Citibank. Upon request, you will inform me if a consumer report has been obtained and will give me the name and address of the agency furnishing the report.

I’m guessing in this instance, they can spam you about other Citibank offers they match you with. On the first page of the application there is a box you can check to say you don’t want them to share any information with their affiliates. I’d recommend checking that.

You can apply here, this is not an affiliate link. I actually tried to sign up for a Citibank affiliate program, but for whatever reason they didn’t accept me. For those of you running blogs that want to promote this, consider signing up through CJ and applying for their program. I believe you can make $20 for everybody you get to sign up.

Here are the terms:

$100 offer is only available for first-time Citibank deposit account customers, and will be paid only once to any individual. Persons who currently have or at any time have had a deposit account at Citibank (or any of its predecessor banks) are not eligible. To receive this offer you must apply for and open a new Ultimate Savings Account by 5/31/2007. $100 will be credited to your Ultimate Savings Account within 90 days from the end of the statement period in which your account was opened. Accounts must be in good standing at the time of the $100 credit.

All accounts are subject to approval. Customer must be a citizen or resident alien of the United States (U.S.) with a valid U.S. taxpayer identification number. The amount of any bonus payment will be reported to the IRS as interest earned in the year credited. Persons under 18 years of age are not eligible. Offer may be modified or withdrawn at any time without notice and is not transferable.

Today I’ve officially turned a 1/4 century old, as I am celebrating my 25th birthday. I’ll be going out to Sakura Steakhouse for dinner and Union Jacks for a little after-dinner drinking. Crystal will be coming into town as well, so it should be a great time!

On another side-note, all of the stocks I own are doing awesome today:

The obvious big hitters from today are Intuit and CNet. Intuit is doing good (finally!) because of an excellent 3rd quarter and raised outlooks from analyst firms. Intuit is the #2 highest gain stock today behind aQuantive, which you may know in the online advertising world for their Atlas ad serving technology. Microsoft picked them up today for $6 billion, a huge amount more per share then they are worth…and this jumped their stock almost 80% today. CNet is doing good because of analysts at First Albany reiterated their “buy” rating, and raised their target price from $10 to $11.

I got into stocks at first just as a forced way to learn more about the market. I only invested a small amount into one stock, but this pretty much forced me to watch it, and learn what affects the share price and many other things just from having to be more involved. The key to this is only to invest what you can afford to lose. Since then I have picked up a few other stocks, and although I had a great day today, overall I am still down. The main reason was from that original first stock (AMD), which lost over 60% of its value at one point. Overall I am down 7%, but things are looking better, and my other stocks have helped offset the loss from AMD. Now I understand when they say to diversify your portfolio.

Who says bloggers have no media power? Yesterday Engadget single handedly made Apple’s stock price lose $4 billion in market capitalization with just one post. Their story claimed that an internal e-mail to company employees at Apple stated that there would be another delay on the Leopard OS as well as on the much hyped iPhone.

“This one doesn’t bode well for Mac fans and the iPhone-hopeful: we have it on authority that as of today, the iPhone launch is being pushed back from June to… October (!), and Leopard is again seeing a delay, this time being pushed all the way back to January,”

What does news like this do to the stock price?

Apple’s stock dropped from $107.89 to $103.42 in just 6 minutes time. It was later on reported that the story was false, and the stock came back up after about 20 minutes, but it still ended up at a loss ($1.25 billion) by the end of the day. The stock is up today so far.

Engadget stated that the tipster sounded legit, and definitely came from Apple’s internal system. Apple is now on the lookout for an employee that sent out the e-mail.

This just goes to show the power of the media. Here’s to accurate reporting!

I recently bought a Dodge Viper, and I mentioned that I’d be driving it around for free, or maybe even getting paid to drive it. So how am I doing this? Careful planning, and a lot of searching/watching for the right deal.

I know you’ve all heard that buying a car is the worst investment you can make. Go to the dealer, pick up the latest and greatest 2007, and watch it lose thousands of dollars as soon as you drive off the lot. That doesn’t sound like a very intelligent thing to do, right? But many of us do it anyway, we want that new car feeling, we want a warranty, and we want the latest thing on the road. I’m the same way, I do like having the latest and greatest, and have purchased two brand new cars in the past 6 years. I’ve also learned from my mistakes. Since buying my 2nd brand new car, I’ve purchased 5 vehicles (3 cars, a motorcycle, and a dirtbike), but they have all been used. I’ve extremely minimized my overall ownership costs on all of these vehicles, allowing me to invest more money into things that will make me more money.

So the most obvious thing here is to find a vehicle that you can get a really good deal on, but that also generally depreciates less than other vehicles. My circle of good friends are all into cars, and all have fast cars. Since I sold my twin turbo 350Z, I have been lacking a true sports car, so I wanted to something for the summer…but I wanted to minimize my cost of doing so. A Dodge Viper is a great car to do this with. I purchased a first generation Viper, which is considered a collectors car. I think they have pretty much depreciated to the point (or very close) where as long as the miles are fairly low, the price will not go much lower (some are even saying that they are starting to appreciate). I could probably park the car in my garage, put a few thousand miles a year on it, and sell it years later for a similar price that I paid. I essentially did that with my 350Z, except the difference was that I lost thousands of dollars!

How Do You Find A Good Deal?

To find my Dodge Viper, there were several important factors:

1. You have to have a budget, and stick to it. It’s hard to not go a little bit over what you wanted to spend, but you have to make a hard-line decision on what you can/want to spend.
2. You have to have the funds available and ready to purchase the car at any second. Having the funds without taking a loan will help minimize your total cost by a lot since there will be no interest paid. I’ll have a post later on about how a good friend of mine makes side-income buying and selling dirt bikes…you’ll see how offering what I call a “right-now” action will give you a huge upper hand in price negotiating.
3. You have to be able to negotiate pricing. You can’t be afraid to work numbers with somebody.
4. You have to be able to walk away from a deal if it’s not what you want. If the price is slightly too high, you need to be able to get yourself to wait for the next chance.
5. Be patient. Finding a good deal can be tough, but they are out there! Follow the guidelines, and you will eventually get one.

These can pretty much be relevant to negotiating anything you’re going to buy, not just a car.

The Search Begins

There will be some research required on your end. I watched forums, eBay, Autotrader, Craigslist, and more to get an idea of what a good price on the Viper is. I knew the general ranges of what they sell for, and I also got an idea of what some of the aftermarket parts go for. Why did I do that? Well the Viper I purchased for example had an aftermarket hard top and glass windows…these sell for $5,000 brand new. I should be able to sell it for around $1,500-$2,000 fast, and I can knock that off the total price of the car. In this scenario, it made a huge difference, and was a big factor in why I chose the car that I did.

After knowing the range that the car normally sells for, you can then begin your search. You obviously need to be able to get the car below or near the low range in order to maximize your deal. You have to factor in additional costs such as shipping and taxes/registration. Once you find the deal you want, jump on it as quickly as possible. Don’t give the seller the opportunity to have another buyer come in and offer higher. If the buyer doesn’t already require it, ask to pay a deposit (usually $500-$1,000) so he will remove the car from wherever it is being sold. This will stop other potential buyers from contacting and offering higher than what you did.

When I bought my Viper I was looking at one in Georgia and working on negotiating a deal. In the meantime I continued watching my sources, and found a perfect one come up on eBay. I immediately contacted the buyer and made an offer. He met me slightly more than halfway, and I sent a deposit for the car right away. This was all done within 2 hours of the seller posting the car on eBay! I’m 95% sure he would have gotten his buy it now price (and even had offers for higher), but because I utilized my action items, I got the car for $1,100 less than the buy it now price. On top of that, I can also take another $1,500-$2,000 off the bottom line when I sell the hard top and glass windows. Keep all this in mind, when you are working out a deal, continue to keep looking as a better one may be right underneath your nose.

Good luck, and if you have any questions or comments about finding a good deal, post a comment!

There hasn’t been an idea out there for a while that I’ve gotten truly excited about. That has all changed with the introduction of a new business started by an entrepreneur named Shearer. The company name? Powercast. If you haven’t heard of them yet, trust me, you will.

What Is It?

Wireless technology has really developed over the last 10 years, its made our lives easier and cleaner…but there has always been one wire left over, the power plug. That’s where a new patented, FCC-approved technology comes in that was invented by Powercast. The technology is wireless power. By utilizing a receiver plugged into the wall, and a receiver chip on the unit, it can act as if it is plugged in up to 3 feet away. The receiver converts radio waves in to DC electricity.

So imagine having your PDA/Cell phone in your pocket, and as soon as you sit down or get in the car it’s automatically charging. Imagine LED lighting in your house with no wires. Imagine medical devices such as pacemakers, that never have to be replaced. I think you can see where I’m going here, the technology is limitless in applications.

Limitations

I’ve already mentioned the 3-foot limitation, but there is also a power limitation. At this time, the technology can only power smaller devices up such as phones, PDAs, LED lights, etc. Something like a TV, computer monitor, or laptop cannot be utilize this technology…yet. The amount of power consumption by devices is getting better by the year. As power consumption goes down, the possibility of wireless power for that device goes up. Lets say I’m Dell. I’m going to do everything in my power to create a laptop that will only need enough power that it can work through wireless power, because I know my laptop will have the edge over other companies, which means it will sell. This thought process will drive many companies to work harder and faster to use less energy for their devices. This is a good thing!

When & How Much?

It sounds like something out of the future, but we’re going to start seeing products released this year, yes, 2007. Powercast has already signed over 100 nondisclosure agreements with companies to develop products. One of the first products will be an LED stick from Phillips. We should expect to see many more products in 2008, such as computer peripherals.

It gets better. The technology is cheap to manufacturer! The actual chip in the product (the whole bread and butter) only costs about $5 to make. I’m sure products will bring a premium because the technology is so new, but we shouldn’t expect to see something like a $1,000 cellphone that can do this…expect your normal prices.

How Do I Plan On Monetizing?

I will be closely watching this company, and I hope that they get an IPO. I just dabble in the stock market, but I only invest in companies which I personally believe in. Powercast has the opportunity to easily be one of the richest companies in the world, it will be very exciting to watch their growth.